PrimalDual

So the point in an economy with underutilized resources money printing does not necessarily translate money printing to inflation directly. More importantly, the US has carried out a huge money printing scheme: QE. The federal reserve bought a couple trillion of US debt de facto reducing the amount of outstanding debt. What I am arguing for is QE with a higher tolerance for inflation.

So I understand that the real solution is to fix the tax system but I doubt that is politically realistic.

I think you are also assuming that returns on all investments would stay the same under increased inflation which I seriously doubt.

More importantly I understand that wealthy people have a smaller portion of their wealth in cash than poor people what I am arguing for is that perhaps inflation is at most no worse than our current taxation scheme.

What do you mean by decades? The US has been borrowing money but that hardly translates to printing it. I can definitely see how quantitative easing essentially translates to printing a couple of trillion to buy outstanding debt but that has already stopped.

By unavoidable I meant that if you hold currency, you are subject to it. Especially if you are holding assets that are appreciating at a slower rate than inflation. Essentially I don't think the wealthy get to loophole or lawyer their way out of inflation the same way they can with taxes.

I meant labor scarcity not in the exonomic sense but in the sense of literally running out of people to allocate. I think it's clear that if businesses have to compete for a dwindling pool of workers prices will inevitably rise.

So right now it comes from other people's paycheck but does it have to? Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending?

Inflation is not the problem it used to be and I actually think it's a much better measure of the economy's capacity than unemployment. Would inflation of 4% be that bad for the public and financial system anyways?

In the US at least I strongly oppose tax-based welfare because I percieve it as a rigged system where the wealthy can avoid paying their fair share through loop holes and classifying their income differently than mine. But inflation in a sense is unavoidable and progressive since the more money you have the more you lose to inflation if you don't invest it. This is especially true if the cause of inflation is labor scarcity and not some other key resource like oil.

I think the story of not having enough young people to pay for older people is missing a bit of evidence. Especially since if labor were scarce we would be seeing increases in wages, inflation and a tight labor market. Instead we have the exact opposite. Really the economy's limiting reactant for the past few years has been demand not labor especially considering that a 2x improvement on productivity is not that big if we consider that worker productivity has been increasing much faster than that over the same period of time. How governments fund their programs is an issue but relative scarcity of labor (or resources) in the economy isn't one of them. This is especially true in europe where lack of inflation has been a real issue for so long.

I like that you bring the legality of these housing restrictions into question. I understand that there is a use for zoning laws in maintaining neighborhood quality; however, I think that what the Bay Area has is a defacto immigration control system. Notice that this doesn't mean expensive neighborhoods are illegal in general. The problem comes when government regulations are the direct cause of elevated housing prices that stop the majority of Americans from being able to live there. I'm probably wrong but I'd like to know of its even theoretically possible for the federal or state governments to do something about this.

People don't have the right to live wherever they want but in the United States the government(local or federal) should not be able to limit immigration of citizens between regions inside the country.

I fail to see the difference between visa requirements for foreigners that wish to live in the United States and a rent requirement to live in the Bay Area. Obviously San Francisco and the Bay Area are not sovereign so they can't require visas and border control but they have instituted a system that has the same effect. Notice that I assume government regulations are the sole cause of high housing costs in the Bay Area.

Another question worth asking would be how stringent do your housing regulations have to be to be considered a violation of other citizens' freedoms?